Q&A: ‘Amazing I Pulled It Off,’ Author Says

Yankee Sailor Convinces South Seas Islanders To Share Seafaring Secrets

Peter Swanson Oct 21

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First of two parts.

Loose Cannon: When your book was first published in 1987, I had just spent the better part of a decade trying to keep my 28-foot wooden sloop from sinking and trying to learn navigation at the same time, including a course in celestial at the Boston Sailing Club. Reading about how the Polynesian navigators did it, was, in the parlance of those days, mind-blowing. “The Last Navigator” project was an enormous undertaking for a 30-year-old. What were you thinking?

Thomas: Yeah, well my wife, Evy, also wondered the same thing, although we met in Bequia while I was bringing a 43-foot RORC racing sloop from England to San Francisco, (ostensibly to sell and make some money. Never made any dough.) We were engaged by then, living in Salem, Massachusetts, and I was both fixing up an old Greek Revival to sell to raise the money to buy another boat and continue around the world, and skippering a rich doctors ULDB (ultra light displacement boat).

I had written a manuscript about my journey from England to San Francisco and through a friends brother submitted it to an agent. She, kindly, acknowledged that it had some lovely writing but was not particularly an original theme. She asked what else I was working on, and I sent her a proposal for The Last Navigator. That was a great idea, she responded, and the somewhat generalized dream to go do this project came clearly into focus.

As I say in the preface to the new edition the dream to go to the Pacific and study with a navigator was a young man’s dream, and I had the supreme good fortune to be able to realize that dream as a young man. Evy was fully supportive, even though it meant I would be disappearing to the wilds of the Pacific (pre sat phone, internet, etc etc) for six months at a time.

I was fully committed to the project, and I knew I could pull it off. That commitment created its own dynamic, and opened up a new set of possibilities. I met Dr. Ben Finney (of the Hokule’a project, then at University of Hawaii), Dr. Ward Goodenough (University of Pennsylvania), Sam Low who just came back from shooting a PBS doc with Piailug among other locations in the Pacific. Things opened up. I got some funding, got my research visas etc., did my extensive preliminary research and in 1983 was on the plane headed to the Pacific.

Looking back, it is amazing I pulled it off. But, I had an uncanny certainty that I could, and would. And, I was absolutely determined.

L.C.: Question: Just so the readers know: Pialug is the main character, the “last navigator” himself. How would you describe the guy?

Thomas: Yes, Piailug is the main character and the unfolding relationship between a young American navigator, and an older Carolinian Navigator is the spine of the story. Piailug was complex —all smooth curves and jagged angles. Youngest of the fully initiated Paliuw and from a “clan of the people” and not a chiefly clan, he had earned his fame by his fearless voyaging in Micronesia, his willingness to teach the hitherto secret arts of navigation and, of course, by his navigating the Hokule’a twice, from Hawaii to Tahiti. He more than anyone, understood the cultural devastation the West would wreck on Carolinian culture—it would mean the death of navigation, and the core of traditional society.

L.C.: Yes, your description of Piailug as “all smooth curves and jagged angles” is quite memorable.

We are following up this interview with a excerpt from the book later this week, and the passage we chose really demonstrates the sheer amount of memorization that this kind of navigation entails. I think most of the readers would regard our celestial navigation as a challenging skill to learn. Polynesian navigation, I have no doubt you agree, is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Thomas: Absolutely. It is a staggering amount of material the paliuw has to memorize and have fully present in his mind as he navigates. And he has to hold everything in his head. In traditional Western navigation with charts, sextant, sight reduction tables, plotting sheets, taffrail log, ships log and even a more or less comfortable nav station, the navigator has a lot of support. You can look back over your notes, your previous sights, see the ships course on the chart of plotting sheet (obviously GPS is a total game changer you can just drive the video game). But the paliuw had to hold course, speed, drift, steering errors, leeway, current offset etc etc in his head, and never ever forget the mental plot, because you can’t go back over your notes, or your plot on the chart. It is, as I way in the book, “one of the great accomplishments of the human mind and spirit”

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L.C.: And yet, despite the absence of instruments and logbooks etc., the process is highly scientific…to a point. My take has been that the process was 90 percent science and 10 percent (for lack of a better word) mysticism. I’m talking about their seemingly unshakeable faith that a dolphin would show itself precisely where a left turn was needed or some other creature. What is your take on this? Is it just the codification of luck?

Thomas: In the education of a paliuw, there comes a time when he starts to be taught that he will have to manage both physical world of way finding at sea, and the metaphysical world, the world of spirits, magic, black magic, spiritual healing, calling the spirits of breadfruit, floating logs under which fish swim, octopus, weather magic to ward off the spirits of strong winds, typhoons, etc.

Before Christianity this was a complete cosmology. As Catholic missionaries established missions in Truk (1912 or so) the Carolinians began to “throw away our magic” This might not have been the full responsibility of the Catholics, as they urged the Carolinians to only throw away the black magic, which was commonly practiced. But the misconception took hold that all magic, even good magic, should be discarded. The navigational systems which incorporated magic or spiritual beliefs were much more resistant to erosion than some of the other systems, like healing magic, weather magic, and the rites that called breadfruit, fish et al to the island. Ewiyong, Pwitaag and chief Otolik were the last of the old guard, the last generation to have a comprehension of the full scope of traditional cosmology.

Chief Otolig taught me:

Yaliulwaei and Yaliummwaeresi are considered sons of Paliuwlap (the great navigator). Paliuwlap and Yaliummwaeresi stay on the giyoa (outrigger crossbeams), and Yaliulwaei stays on the taam (the outrigger itself). They watch the paliuw to make sure he has “brightness” (wisdom, attentiveness, focus, energy, clear thinking) in his body. If he thinks poorly, then they help him to find the island. Originally they came from the sky. They stay inside the mast until they are called.

The Ppwo initiation ceremony, by which a student became a full fledged navigator brought “the heat of Yaliummwaeresi into the initiates body to make him “bright”

There is, in the extensive interviews I did with the elders, and which did not find their way into the book, the belief that the navigator became a spirit while he was sailing the canoe, and upon reaching land was transformed back into a human. I just caught the very tail end of this world. When the aforementioned elders, and then Piailug, Urupoa. Fortunately the extensive material in my archives at the University of Hawaii, Mano’a contain all that I recorded, and with the Satawalese we are working on a monograph, a kind of cultural handbook, to return this cultural legacy to Satawal.

L.C.: You said somewhere that Last Navigator was changed for the latest edition. Could you please elaborate on that?

Thomas: I edited this edition very lightly, removing unnecessary references to my own family and personal feelings at the time. I also put into a more nuanced context the narrative of the rivalries between Piailug, a man of great force, courage, and renown, and some of the other navigators. We also changed all the pseudonyms from the first editions back to the original names, and with Raffipiy and his brothers confirmed all questions they had about navigational points by going back to the original source material.

I do go into this in some detail in the preface to the revised edition. We also, of course, added many more photographs from my collection.

L.C.: I don’t think Port Clyde could be as bad, but here in Green Cove Springs—with the towers of Jacksonville looming on the horizon—the light pollution is so prevalent we barely see anything but the moon and Venus. Sailing star paths in the South Pacific must have been like flying through space itself.

Thomas: It was indeed, especially with Mau Piailug as a guide.

L.C.: How do you think those guys would have handled fog?

Thomas: There is a technique call Meafiy, which means “to feel”. The navigator feels the roll and pitch of the canoe in the seaway, and can maintain his course using that. It is of course extremely difficult. When the Germans introduced the magnetic compass to Micronesia it quickly supplanted both “wave tying” and meafiy.

L.C. Rereading the book, I was reminded that it wasn’t all you dressed like Tarzan dancing through a stack of National Geographics. There were some down moments, too. For a while, your relationship with Piailug was troubled. How long did your “apprenticeship” last and what was your worst experience?

Thomas: I was in Micronesia for six months in 1983 and five months in 1984. I returned in 1987 and 1988 to do the film. Aside from loneliness and feeling very much out of the Western world (in terms of world view, not material goods, which I didn’t care about) the toughest moments were toward the end of the second year. This of course leads up the rapprochement just as I was leaving Satawal.

Of course. the other dicey moment was when I was told the young men were going to kill me because I picked up the Chief by his feet.

L.C.: Haha. Okay I’ve got a question that has nothing to do with navigation or your state of mind. A little while after your book debuted, there was another book about the South Pacific called “The Happy Isles of Oceania” by Paul Theroux, who was obviously pretty unhappy when he wrote it. One fact I retained was the omnipresence of Spam. This was a legacy of the American military in World War II and, according to Theroux, was on every menu, breakfast lunch and dinner. I don’t remember any mention in your book. Did the Carolines manage to escape this legacy?

Thomas: Yes for the most part. But when the fishing was bad we ate canned mackerel. Spam is what won World War II. My father, who served in the pacific on merchant vessels (bad eyesight) loved spam until the end of his days.

L.C.: Air Force family here, same same. In fact, my father and his buddies chartered a sailing canoe for a few days during the war. (As for Spam, I can’t believe I used to like it.) Another dumb question, which you must endure as the price of celebrity. You probably didn’t get to use an adze too often on “This Old House,” but was there anything from your Pacific adventure that helped make you a better TV handyman?

Thomas: Yeah. A boatbuilders slick is pretty close to an adze. I use it whenever I can find the pretext to do so!

L.C.: Readers will probably be curious what you’ve been doing since the television show. Any new plans or projects?

Thomas: After “This Old House,” I was host and producer on “Save Our History” on the History Channel, then host and producer on Renovation Nation with Steve Thomas (Discovery’s Planet Green). Then, I worked for Habitat for Humanity International for five years doing some work in Africa and all across the U.S. Then, I went back into “private practice” with Steve Thomas Builders. We’ve done all kinds of challenging and cool projects.

L.C.: If you want to see how not to build houses–writ large–come visit down here in Florida. Make it a tax deduction. Plus, I’ll happily buy you a beer or two. Do you have any final thoughts, or an answer to a question I didn’t think to ask?

Thomas: In 1983, I casually mentioned to Piailug that my wife loved conch shells. In my absence he buried some on Pigeeleo in a secret spot. When we sailed there in 1984, he dug them up for me, pristine and beautiful from their time under the sand. Now, when I put one to my ear, I can still hear the “Talk of the Sea.”

Tomorrow: An excerpt from “The Last Navigator.”

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